Aligning business strategy and data strategy can be challenging.

As a technical advisor, one of the most frustrating experiences is convincing business leaders to align business and technical strategies. I have been helping small, medium, and large companies with modern data systems and strategies in Thailand for over six years. I have yet to find one company that already aligned its technical strategy with its business strategy. Additionally, I found it extremely difficult to convince them to work on this problem.

Most of the time, it is the technical team who recruited me to help them communicate with the business team, and not vice versa. Getting the two sides to agree takes a lot of work. Aligned business and data strategy require buy-in from executives to ensure that they are prioritized and funded appropriately. However, executives may need to fully understand the value of data or the potential impact of data initiatives on business outcomes. This can secure the necessary funding and resources to support a cohesive data strategy.

The Pain Points

Usually, business leaders may speak a different language than data professionals, making communicating effectively and aligning business goals with data strategy challenging. This can lead to misunderstandings and misaligned expectations, resulting in data initiatives that don’t deliver the desired business outcomes.

Because business priorities can shift rapidly, it can take time for the data team to keep up. The business team focuses on an agile business strategy, while the data team usually has a slower-changing data strategy. This can make it challenging to align data initiatives with evolving business objectives. While data technology is growing super fast, and there are so many new and exciting technologies coming out frequently. The problem I experienced is that the business team often wants the technical use of new technologies to meet their strategy. Unfortunately, integrating new technologies into existing infrastructure requires a lot of thinking and planning.

To help the business and data teams, I have summarized potential points that both teams should address to help them effectively and efficiently align their strategies.

1. Different Goals: Business strategies often aim for market growth, customer satisfaction, and profitability, while technical strategies focus on system stability, security, and innovation. These objectives can sometimes conflict.
2. Communication Gap: Business leaders and technical teams often use different jargon and have different perspectives. This can lead to misunderstandings and misalignment.
3. Rapid Technological Change: Technology evolves rapidly, making it difficult for business strategies to keep up. Conversely, technology strategies become outdated if tied too closely to a slow-moving business plan.
4. Resource Constraints: Both business and technical strategies require resources (money, time, personnel). Balancing the resource needs of both can be challenging. I have found that aligning business and technical strategies can help the company better balance resources.
5. Resistance to Change: Businesses often resist changes that could disrupt operations, while technology typically involves change and adaptation. In any case, I found that the business teams use the disruptive operation as a reason because they are worried that the new technology will replace them.
6. Understanding the Value: Business leaders may not fully understand the value of specific technologies, and technical leaders may not fully grasp the business implications of their work.
7. Data silos: Many organizations have data stored in silos across various departments and systems, making it difficult to access and integrate the data. This can make it challenging to align data with business goals and develop a cohesive data strategy that supports business objectives. In one company I helped, one business team stored data in Cloudera-Hadoop, one on GCP to utilize Big Query, and on Azure and using Databricks.

Aligning business and data strategies requires a concerted effort to break down data silos, establish clear communication, prioritize data initiatives, implement data governance, and secure executive buy-in. This complex process requires ongoing collaboration and a shared understanding of the value of data for the organization.

In summary, aligning business strategy and data strategy empowers organizations to make better decisions, improve operational efficiency, gain a competitive edge, understand customers better, allocate resources effectively, and remain agile in a dynamic business environment.